KEEPING BEES: THE GOOD NEWS AND THE BAD NEWS IN IDAHO

                               

    I have always been afraid of bees.  When my sister was younger, she was stung by a bee. Highly allergic, she developed a huge paw for a hand.  It took days for the swelling to go down. The next year, I was stung on my arm, an unfortunate, unplanned rite of passage.  I too had a swollen area around the stinger.  So when my husband decided that bees would be a fine addition to our back to the land of five acres and no independence in Idaho, I was skeptical of being around hundreds of bees.  But if you love honey and you make a commitment to the land, then you try things that maybe you ought to have left alone.

    “You’ll have to do all work with the bees yourself,” I said.

    “What’s to do,” he said.  “All you do is put the hives out there.  The worker bees do all the work, and then you get honey.”

    Five books later, three hives later, and with puffs from our smoker, a safari hat with a bee veil over it, long-sleeved shirts, Levis, and boots, we harvested our own honey.  We were full-fledged bee keepers.

    “Oh look,” I said,  as we drove around Idaho. “There’s ten hives, look there’s twenty.”

    We noticed the white hive boxes set in farmers’ fields. Our perception of what was important had changed, with bees becoming part of our back to the land and beyond dreams.  But it was not always easy.

    During the heat of one summer, when we were gone from what my father called the Lazy S Ranch,  some of the bees decided, for whatever reason, to get out of their own private Dodge, and head to a new home.

    A call came to us in Los Angeles from our neighbor, who was taking care of our home.

    “I have some good news and some bad news, “ he said
.
             Ah, I wanted the good news first.

    “You have another swarm of bees for a hive,” he said.

    “Excellent,” I said.

    Our neighbor didn’t say anything.

    “What’s the bad news?” I asked.

    “Well,” he said, then paused for the longest time.  “They’re in your fire place wall and inside your living room.”

      Uh-oh.

    When we returned home, we slowly approached the outside wall of the fireplace.  We could hear a humming behind the brick.  We didn’t want to go inside, but then, well, you can’t let bees be in control of your life, so we opened the door.  Those bees that had managed to forage out into the living room were lost and lonely, wandering around looking for flowers, thunking against windows.  Or dead on the floor.

    We couldn’t get that hive out without taking the fireplace apart, so we had to kill those bees with pesticides, and  the ones inside perished by our hand with a fly swatter.   As a city dweller, I didn’t do well with this survival motif of the ranch, and the killer of bees mentality that we had to adopt.

     The fourth hive arrived shortly after that incident.  My husband became the “go-to” man that the fire department or police called “ to come and get this swarm of bees.” He would arrive dressed in a suit and tie, from an office job and took off his coat. One Saturday, kids circled around.

    “Hey, he’s going after those bees without any protection,” one of boys said.  They nudged each other, getting close, but not too close to all those bees.

    From the trunk of our old l976 car, my husband pulled a hive body, walked over to the tractor seat where the bees had gathered in a swarm and gently, oh so gently, I am sure, gathered the bees into the box, and put the lid on.  We had hive number four.

    Other bee adventures defined their place in our universe.  Once a truck loaded with bees overturned on a major highway in Idaho.  Bees filled the air, but not as a swarm comfortably flying together.  With windows up, we passed that scene as fast as we could.

    The  next bee event was the task of getting the honey and comb from the hives.  We wheel-barrowed the honey and comb the seven hundred feet back to our house.  Our hair, our arms, and clothes were touched by honey.  And finally the kitchen, where we ended up, was sticky as well. It was the best honey.

    The final encounter with bees was one we never anticipated.  The humming hives went through a nice fall--the bees coming and going every day.  We’d left enough honey for their winter, but we had no clue about the impact of the heavy snow on the hives or the toll it would take on the bees. Ten inches of wet snow covered the hives and the snow blew up against their entrance and exit ramp. They were sealed in.  Gone, they were.  Nothing to be done.  You can’t go through having live beings die around you and not feel something.  So no more bees.
 
    We began buying our honey from beekeepers in rural Kuna – delicious clover honey first, then honey from sage.  Mmmmm.  Tasted important to us then, after knowing that bees had spent their lives making it.